Should faculty salaries be higher?

It's almost an urban legend that our elite institutions (EIs) -- such as the IITs and IIMs -- are facing an acute faculty crunch. The shortfall in faculty in some IITs is alleged to be as high as 30%. With the impending 54 % increase in student intake due to the government's reservation policy -- this increase will preserve the number of general category seats -- the faculty crunch can only get crunchier. At least, that's the theory.

However, for each position that our EI's seek to fill, I'm sure they receive quite a few applications. The fact that so many faculty positions remain unfilled must be because the institutions find many -- if not most -- of the applicants unsuitable. Clearly, there's intense pressure on EIs to do something about making faculty positions more attractive, so that they attract more and better candidates. Increasing faculty salaries is one of the suggestions.

As attractive as this solution is -- hey, I would love a bigger paycheque! Who wouldn't? -- there are some issues that I want to ramble on about touch upon.

First of all, are the current salaries really too low? A fresh recruit (e.g., an Assistant Professor at an IIT) starts at a pre-tax salary of about Rs. 250,000 per year, which works out to a measly $5,000! Per year!! Convert this figure using purchasing power parity (and I believe the factor is about six for India), this figure magically 'grows' to a far more respectable $30,000 per year.

Let's add some non-monetary perks to this figure. Most EIs have rather nice campuses with their own residential zones with faculty housing, and on-campus schooling for their children. There are other benefits associated with staying on campus: silent, pollution-free campus and healthier living. Most importantly, commuting through brutal traffic conditions is not necessary. If you monetize these benefits, it would work out quite easily to between Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 100,000 a year, (or 5,000 to 10,000 PPP dollars).

From this point of view, the salary doesn't appear all that low. However, a PPP factor of six is only an average figure for the entire country. Presumably, this factor is different for different classes of goods; a dollar can go a long way in our country if food is what you are buying. It certainly doesn't go far when you are buying a car or a computer. Thus, the PPP factor is probably quite high for the former, and quite close to (or, even less than) one for the latter. Presumably, faculty members at EIs consume more of the latter than of the former; if so, the PPP factor appropriate for them is likely lower than six. This argument pushes the PPP adjusted salary back -- and down -- to sob-inducing levels.

Let's use another metric: compare the raw salary (without adjusting for PPP) against our per capita GDP, which is about Rs. 25,000. At about 10 times the per capita GDP, the salary of a junior faculty member in an EI doesn't appear too low. In fact, this salary would place our junior faculty members in the top 3 percentile of our population.

One may complain, rightly, that the above metrics are not quite correct. It's the low per capita GDP (and high PPP factor) that lead us to believe that the faculty salary is not too low. In absolute terms, the salary is still abysmal!

Also, one may argue -- and again, rightly -- that the comparison should be not with per capita GDP, but with a peer group of people with similar education and training who are working in other spheres, and in particular, in private industry.

To my knowledge, academics' salaries are generally lower than in industry in every country. If you think of this salary gap (between academy and industry) as the value of academic freedom, this value is huge in our country, and it's growing by leaps and bounds every year. [This perceptive observation comes from Jayant, a good friend and colleague of mine].

Does it mean that EIs should think seriously about enhancing faculty salaries? May be. However, across-the-board salary increases are unlikely due to practical difficulties, which stem from the fact that almost all our EIs are publicly funded. They are autonomous, all right; but public funding imposes certain restrictions. For example:

• In our government, everyone is placed on a certain rung in an enormous ladder called 'pay scale'. The rungs in this ladder establish equivalence across areas. For example, an assistant professor's pay scale may be equivalent to that of a junior assistant deputy secretary (special duty) in the Central government. In our government, the structure of this pay-scale ladder is so sacrosanct, that only a high-power (but un-empowered) committee called the Pay Commission is allowed to tinker with it. Once every ten years or so. Bottomline: this is not a viable route, if you are thinking about enhanced faculty salaries in EIs.
• Our government has difficulty in identifying high performers, and in rewarding them through differential pay. In theory, multiple increments in salary are possible, but this motivational instrument is used rarely. The upshot is that all assistant professors end up earning essentially the same salary. This implies that an across-the-board enhancement in faculty salary is not really a great idea, since it would end up 'rewarding' duds as well as the more deserving.

The answer, clearly, is in getting the EIs to move towards a system where incentives are aligned with their overall goals. What might they be?

Many faculty members offer their expertise to industry through consultancy, and earn some extra money. For example, some IIM faculty have been reported to earn, through consultancy, several times their regular salary. This route of rewarding people has its pitfalls, however. First of all, not all fields are consulting-friendly. Also, consulting can only be a small part (typically, less than 20 %) of an academic institution's activities. Yet another problem is that consultancy projects often tend to be routine tasks, require little intellectual input, and don't lead to substantial, publication-worthy research.

Yet another method, practised in the US, is to allow faculty members to earn some money through their research grants. In India, much of the research funding also comes from government, and at present, our funding agencies don't allow a 'salary component' for the recepient of research grants. If at all anyone should clamour for any 'reform', I believe it should be to get our funding agencies to change this rule. This one change also has the virtue of aligning rewards with the EIs' mission.

[Oh, by the way, research grants from private sources -- such as industry, philanthropic trusts -- do allow faculty to earn some salary. This mode of funding, however, is small in our overall research pie.]

Entrepreneurship is another possibility, but we have too little experience with this route. Moreover, I'm not too conversant with the rules of the game here, so I won't say much about it.

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Finally, faculty salaries can be as high as the market would bear in private institutions. The current, intense competition for highly qualified people should have pushed up salary levels in those institutions that require them. Thus, I would guess that the faculty salaries in the Indian School of Business at Hyderabad are considerably higher than those at the IIMs. Is my guess right? If so, does ISB attract better candidates because of this 'salary advantage'? If you have some insights to offer, please leave a comment.

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Are there other initiatives that our EIs can adopt and implement that will make faculty positions more attractive? I do plan to get back to this topic; but since I have rambled on for too long, let me stop here. It should not, however, stop you from giving your ideas ...

Must read posts on gender differences in cognition

Two posts. Over at Pure Pedantry. By Jake Young. Via P.Z. Myers.

Both the posts summarize neatly several key 'overview type' papers on what is currently known about gender differences in cognition and cognitive abilities.

Verdict: Yeah, sure, people have found some differences; but they can't be responsible for gender imbalances in sciences and engineering.

Gender debate in science: Barres - 10, Pinker - 0

Remember the explosive piece in Nature by Ben Barres? It's behind the paywall, but I have some excerpts here. I have another post with links to quite a few other things that emerged in the aftermath of Barres' piece.

In his article, Ben Barres, who was a woman named Barbara before he underwent sex change treatment in 1997, takes offence at the suggestion -- which he calls the "Larry Summers Hypothesis" -- that "differences in innate aptitude rather than discrimination were more likely to be to blame for the failure of women to advance in scientific careers". He says:

My main purpose in writing this commentary is that I would like female students to feel that they will have equal opportunity in their scientific careers. Until intolerance is addressed, women will continue to advance only slowly. Of course, this feeling is also deeply personal to me. The comments of Summers, Mansfield, Pinker and Lawrence about women's lesser innate abilities are all wrongful and personal attacks on my character and capabilities, as well as on my colleagues' and students' abilities and self esteem. I will certainly not sit around silently and endure them.

Given the controversy generated by Barres' original article, it's unfair on Nature's part to keep it behind its paywall while making the responses (including a nasty one by Steven Pinker) available to the public for free.

The latest issue of Nature has responses from two of those named in the quote: Steven Pinker and Peter Lawrence. Given what Barres says in the article, it's understandable that these two gentlemen would want to offer a defence of their views. I want to concentrate on Pinker's response. In Barres' article, Pinker appears in two other places in addition to the quote above:

Last year, Harvard University president Larry Summers suggested that differences in innate aptitude rather than discrimination were more likely to be to blame for the failure of women to advance in scientific careers. Harvard professor Steven Pinker then put forth a similar argument in an online debate.

Steven Pinker has responded to critics of the Larry Summers Hypothesis by suggesting that they are angry because they feel the idea that women are innately inferior is so dangerous that it is sinful even to think about it.

Crying foul, Pinker says in his response that his views have been misrepresented.

In my book The Blank Slate, ... and in a published debate, I reviewed a large empirical literature showing differences in mean and variance in the distributions of talents, temperaments and life priorities among men and women. Given these differences, some favouring men, some women, it is unlikely that the proportions of men and women in any profession would be identical, even without discrimination. That is probably one of several reasons that the sex ratio tips towards women in some scientific disciplines ... and towards men in others. Barres renders this conclusion as "a whole group of people is innately wired to fail" — an egregious distortion.

Barres claims that I have denied that sex discrimination is a significant factor in professional life, whereas I have repeatedly stated the opposite... [bold emphasis added]

If you go back to the full article -- But, without a subscription, you can't! -- you won't find Pinker being linked to anything that he says Barres wrote about him. What you will find, instead, is the following, which comes close to Pinker's first complaint:

It is incumbent upon those proclaiming gender differences in abilities to rigorously address whether suspected differences are real before suggesting that a whole group of people is innately wired to fail. [bold emphasis added]

Similarly, the closest that I could come to Pinker's second complaint is where Barres says, "Despite these studies, very few men or women are willing to admit that discrimination is a serious problem in science."

Clearly, Pinker is upto some shady business here. Consider this. Barres says -- specifically, and in at least two places -- that Pinker belongs to the camp that regards innate differences as more important than discrimination in holding women back in science. Does Pinker dispute or refute that assertion? No!

Instead, what Pinker does is to de-link the two things. He first recaps research findings about gender differences, and then asserts that he never denied the significance of discrimination. For all we know, he may well be right on these two things, but Barres never claimed otherwise! In other words, Barres' claim is not about these two separate things, but about their relative importance in explaining gender imbalance in science. Thus, instead of addressing Barres' specific claim, Pinker chooses to address two separate things that Barres didn't say! Strawman, anyone?

Finally, Pinker ends his response on a snarky note:

... in my experience, students of both sexes are attracted to science because it promises an honest investigation into how the world works, an alternative to the subjectivity, simplistic dichotomies and moralistic name-calling that characterize politics and personal quarrels. Let's hope Barres's Commentary article does not discourage them. [bold emphasis added]

Coming from a leading academic, this is a mean, low attack, and he is wrong on everything he associates -- implicitly, mind you -- with Barres. Barres cites honest, objective studies to support his view that (a) innate gender differences are not all they're made out to be and (b) discrimination is quite rampant. His arguments are nuanced, and he is generous to his opponents when he says, "I'm certain that all the proponents of the Larry Summers Hypothesis are well-meaning and fair-minded people." He certainly doesn't get into 'name-calling' (for example, he doesn't call Pinker 'sexist' or a 'discriminator'). And finally, citing Pinker as an example of those with certain views is not a 'personal quarrel'. By linking these evidently bad things with Barres (through that last sentence), it's Pinker who's doing the mud-slinging.

Score so far: Barres-10, Pinker-0

N.R. Natraj and L.N.Mittal

When I examine Mittal and Nattu [N.R. Natraj], a few common things emerge (other than the fact that they both are iron men). They both chose a non-glamorous domain to build their self-actualization dreams. Once identified, they pursued the dream with a single-minded dedication, first by gaining the domain knowledge and skills and then by developing a game plan for the long haul. They both have that infinite patience, unwavering ‘stick-to-it’ive ness, in spite of so many distractions and naysayers around them. They allocate their physical, mental and spiritual resources for the entire duration of the course, avoiding dropping out or quickly burning out or settling for simple things. And most importantly, they stay the course – which is considered almost a sin in many corporate boardrooms, because most corporate types expect ‘action’ and ‘progress’ every two minutes. ...

From Ramesh Mahadevan's Newspaper Stories.

Nattu Natraj was a member of our 'virtual Desi joint family' in Pittsburgh during the late eighties, and lives in Boulder, Colorado. Here's Ramesh on Nattu's recent achievement:

Nattu Natraj, just last week completed the Badwaters Marathon in Death Valley, California, donning the Indian tricolor flag. This race is dubbed as the ‘baddest, toughest foot race on the planet’ and Nattu was among a selected group of 85 world class athletes from twelve countries. The ‘marathon’ is actually over five marathons long, covering a distance of nearly 210 km. Death Valley records a bone-melting 125 degree heat (50 deg C) which goes up to 145 degrees on asphalt. The temperature is so high that credit cards are supposed to melt and cold drinks turn into tepid soups in ten minutes, according to a reporter of the Washington Post. And the course goes through approximately five kilometers of vertical ups and downs. Nattu Natraj came in at number fifty overall, finishing the race in about 46 hours.

Media Lab Asia and the OLPC

Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is also the founder of MIT's famed Media Lab which partnered with the Indian government to set up its Asian branch (Media Lab Asia) on Indian soil. This collaboration proved to be bitter and, consequently, short-lived. The man who pulled the plug on it was none other than Arun Shourie, the then Minister of IT and Telecom. Here's a BusinessWeek story from 2003:

... Media Labs Asia ran for a year solely on the $13.5 million seed money provided by the Indian government, with MIT contributing nothing yet calling the shots on the lab's project, say insiders. Much of the money went toward paying the lab's staff, as if they were international civil servants. ... Few MIT professors visited the labs at any of IIT's branches, say students and professors at the institutions. "MIT didn't add much value," says a source close to the project ... MIT's plan of getting funding for India was flawed from the get-go. Multinationals like Microsoft (MSFT ), Intel (INTC ), and Cisco (CSCO) already have huge research and development operations in India, so they likely saw little value in sponsoring other research projects that don't relate directly to their businesses. ... [T]he IIT professors whose job it was to oversee the projects declared that MIT added no value in research or in corporate sponsorships. And it was revealed that MIT asked the Indian government to pay $1.7 million for the use of the MIT name. That was perhaps the last straw.

Could India's recent rejection of the OLPC have something to do with the country's earlier experience with the Media Lab Asia? ZDNet-UK speculates:

As with MIT Media Lab Europe, which set up shop in Dublin in 2000 only to close its shutters in 2005, MIT Media Lab Asia (Mumbai, 2001-5) attracted government funding, criticism and then the bum's rush. According to one Indian researcher who talked to us, the bad feelings left behind are still strong enough to render Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab founder and lead wolf on OPLC, persona non grata within the subcontinent — and guarantee the rejection of any project with his name attached.

Let's just follow up on the first sentence of this quote. Just what was the record of Media Lab Europe, set up in Ireland? Here's ZDNet-UK again:

The Irish public auditor found that after five years and nearly 50 million euros, most of which was public money, the place had produced just 24 scientific papers and 12 useless patents. While it was running, MIT Media Lab Europe "refused to tell ministers how many people it employed, what they were paid, or to provide audited accounts", according to the Sunday Times, but it did manage to award them substantial severance payments when time ran out.

The ZDNet-UK article ends with a rather snarky advice to the countries that are considering buying a million laptops from Negroponte's OLPC:

For an experiment of this size and expense, one with the potential to set education agendas for millions, due diligence is required. As they say in the adverts, past performance is no guarantee of future results — but sometimes, it can be most educational.

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Thanks to the Unofficial OLPC Website's blog for the link to the ZDNet-UK article.

Gender differences

The Economist has a survey of recent research (with references) into gender differences in human behaviour.

... [B]iological explanations of human behaviour are making a comeback as the generation of academics that feared them as a covert way of justifying eugenics, or of thwarting Marxist utopianism, is retiring. The success of neo-Darwinism has provided an intellectual underpinning for discussion about why some differences between the sexes might be innate. And new scanning techniques have enabled researchers to examine the brain's interior while it is working, showing that male and female brains do, at one level, operate differently. The results, however, do not always support past clichés about what the differences in question actually are.

Arun Singh's advice to V.S. Arunachalam

This week I received a surprise phone call from Arun Singh, obviously shocked by Arunachalam’s name getting dragged into this ['mole' in Narasimha Rao's PMO] mess. He told me the truth behind his seemingly “abrupt” departure. He was back in the government as the head of Committee on Defence Expenditures (CDE) in the V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar governments and advised Arunachalam that he had been the head of DRDO for too long, 11 years, and it was not good for him, his family, or the organisation. For how long was he going to run his household on a government salary, particularly when all three of his children could study overseas. It is then, Arun Singh tells me, that the scientist told him he had a position available at Carnegie Mellon, which has one of the finest labs in his field — metallurgy, robotics and computer sciences. “We thought this was a perfect place for him to go to, as he could also work with Dr Raj Reddy who is an icon in the world of robotics and high tech. This would have also given his children an opportunity to study free in one of the best schools in the US because Arunachalam, as a faculty member, would be entitled to it.” Singh says the problem was, how to convince the prime minister to let him go and who was to be the new head of DRDO. Arunachalam met Narasimha Rao several times to convince him that he needed to leave and that he would not be missed because there was a very logical successor, albeit a bit old. That rather “old” person was none else than President A.P. J. Kalam!   [bold emphasis added]

From Shekhar Gupta's column in today's Indian Express.

Two gutsy academics protest against Narendra Modi

Ram Guha on the protest by two gutsy professors from IIT-Madras:

The speech Modi was delivering in Chennai was part of a further ‘mainstreaming’ of his image, part of the somewhat successful attempt to make the English-speaking middle class forget his role in the riots of 2002 by re-presenting himself as an efficient administrator and engineer of economic growth. ... [T]he IIT Chennai meeting — hosted by the foundation named for and started by the eminent scientist, M.S. Swaminathan — was intended to further a technical mission to make ‘Every Village a Knowledge Centre’. Before Modi could speak, two women went up to the stage and held up a placard which read: “Mr Modi, We disapprove”. Later, they told a reporter that “we came to protest his government’s policies. He could not stop the Gujarat communal riots, his handling of the Narmada dam issue is deplorable, and recently he stopped the screening of the Hindi film Fanaa”.

[...]

... [I] ... believe that what Enakshi Bhattacharya and Nandita DasGupta did at Chennai last week was salutary. It was also very brave — for unlike the typical left-wing protestor, they could not seek the anonymity of the crowd, and had much to lose — namely, a career that was hard-won as well as highly prized.

As the elected chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi has a right to be present at meetings organized by the Union government or public sector institutions. However, when it comes to meetings hosted by private or autonomous institutions, an invitation to Modi is a privilege, to be gifted or withdrawn as per the courtesy of the host. These have to judge not just his office, but also his record in office. And that includes not just his collusion in — some would say active sponsorship of — the riots of 2002, but also his continuing attempts to stifle the free expression of opinion in his state, as in the last illustration offered by the two IIT ladies — the shocking ban on the film Fanaa, enforced because one of its actors thinks that those displaced by the Sardar Sarovar dam should be decently rehabilitated.

The link to the Telegraph story on this 'incident' is here.

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Thanks to Pradeepkumar for the link to Guha's column.

PhD, Performance Measures, Professors

Links to three interesting articles. Let's go in the reverse order.

Teacher, researcher, professor: Just how different are these roles? (pdf; very interesting perspective)

Measuring research performance (a quirky take on how 'they' measure your worth as an academic)

Notes on the Ph.D. degree (a little too CS-centric).

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Thanks to Vishnu for the first, and to Subrahmanya for the last two.

Why do economists blog?

From this Economist story (via Brad DeLong (who is quoted in it):

Like millions of others, economists from circles of academia and public policy spend hours each day writing for nothing. The concept seems at odds with the notion of economists as intellectual instruments trained in the maximisation of utility or profit. Yet the demand is there: some of their blogs get thousands of visitors daily, often from people at influential institutions like the IMF and the Federal Reserve. One of the most active “econobloggers” is Brad DeLong, of the University of California, Berkeley, whose site, delong.typepad.com, features a morning-coffee videocast and an afternoon-tea audiocast in which he holds forth on a spread of topics from the Treasury to Trotsky.

So why do it? “It's a place in the intellectual influence game,” Mr DeLong replies (by e-mail, naturally). For prominent economists, that place can come with a price. Time spent on the internet could otherwise be spent on traditional publishing or collecting consulting fees. Mr DeLong caps his blogging at 90 minutes a day. His only blog revenue comes from selling advertising links to help cover the cost of his servers, which handle more than 20,000 visitors daily.

Arun Shourie's talk on "Equal Opportunity"

Arun Shourie gave a talk in IISc yesterday on Equal Opportunity: Alternatives and their Efficacies. I have a post on this talk over at How the Other Half Lives.

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Badri has the audio of P.S. Krishnan's lecture on Social Justice and Reservation. Krishnan is a "former secretary to the Government of India, former member secretary of the National Commission for Backward Classes, [and] ... [was] the Secretary in-charge during VP Singh's time resurrecting the Mandal Commission Report."

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The reservation issue is in the news again. Mr. Veerappa Moily's Oversight Committee has recommended, in an interim report, a phased implementation (also check out this report) of the proposed OBC quotas in higher education.

Protecting the Web from 'regulatory capture'

When broadband companies try to charge consumers of internet content (such as you and me) as well as content hosts (such as Google, Blogger, Flickr), there's a clear danger of the internet being carved up into two (or more) kinds of 'internets': a faster net for companies that pay, and a slower one for those who don't. Since this tips the scale in favour of the 'haves' and against the 'have-nots', it endangers the democratic nature of the internet which (currently) carries your voice irrespective of how small you are. If you thought -- like I did -- that a regulation that mandates 'net neutrality' is a good way of combating greedy broadband companies, you will be forced into a re-think after reading the sobering message in this NYTimes column by Timothy B. Lee:

It’s tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.

Economists have dubbed this process “regulatory capture,” and they can point to plenty of examples. The airline industry was a cozy cartel before being deregulated in the 1970’s. Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition.

Newton's first law of blogging

"When you write, you can't stop and when you stop, you can’t start," says Sue.

if you are a regular blogger out there, don’t stop - even if you feel like your world is collapsing around you and you barely have time to breathe, let alone the grocery shopping and the laundry and the umpteen boring things that makes life go on in a socially acceptable fashion - even then you should continue. Or you will be a victim of inertia, just like me. When you write, you cant stop and when you stop, you can’t start - who else can you blame but good old Newton, with the apple on his head.

Jas'made-up-a-story-now-what-do-you'want Singh

From the Hindu's editorial:

... In the days since the book's release, Mr. [Jaswant] Singh has chopped and changed the story — first relying on the "letter" to allege that the Rao regime put off nuclear testing under pressure from a forewarned U.S. Government, then dismissing the "letter" as being of no major consequence, going on to say that he was not sure if the person was a "civil servant or uncivil servant" or a "PMO official" and then simply throwing up his hands with "I don't have his name."

Thanks to this man's shenanigans, corrosive clouds hang over a gullible nation, causing acid rains that tarnish reputations that took an entire life to build.

All for what? A few more suckers to buy a silly book? I can't believe this selfish creep was considered a sane voice -- and even a wise voice, according to some -- in the previous regime.

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Krish finds this entry in the Right Wing Dictionary.

Rajat Gupta on IITs

... [I]f we are honest, we will say we have created a fantastic Joint Entrance Exam. We have then done a reasonable job of teaching them. These institutions –the IITs and IIMs –have created a brand because of the success of their alumni. Not because of their research output. Not because they have created huge amounts of innovation. We have to create innovation and research to make the IITs truly competitive. On that front we have to a long way to go.

[...]

The government has an important role to play—including in creating institutions of higher learning. But there is no reason why higher education should be the sole purview of the state. It should create a framework where the private sector can be deployed to create institutes of higher learning. Obviously, the government has a responsibility of setting standards and of regulating.

In the next 10 years, India will have more people of employable age than any other country in the history of the world. To deploy them effectively, we need a large system of higher and vocational education. All of these areas should be open to the public and private sectors and also public-private partnerships.

From this short interview.